“The camera is an excuse to share the life of the people, the rhythm and sympathy of festivals, to discover my country.” — Graciela Iturbide
Through Nov. 29, SFMOMA invites the public into the dreamlike world of black-and-white photographer Graciela Iturbide. Decades of images expose a magic realist world of tradition and culture through the artist’s own poetic lens. The museum’s connection to Iturbide spans decades. SFMOMA was the first institution in the United States to present a solo exhibition of Iturbide’s photography in 1990. Now, the museum brings the experience full circle in this retrospective, sharing the full breadth of her career.
The extraordinary in the everyday
Between Two Worlds features over 150 photographs from the 1960s to the 2010s that reveal the cultural richness of the artist’s home country of Mexico. Festivals, eccentric characters, and urban markets caught her eye when she was outdoors with her camera. Iturbide was attracted to events and practices that interweave Catholic rituals with Indigenous traditions, and the ways in which people make meaning and fantasy in their daily lives. “Graciela Iturbide’s photographs describe an array of life in Mexico that is so intimate and full of wonder that the viewer feels transported into a literary realm, like that of a vivid novel,” said Delphine Sims, SFMOMA’s assistant curator of photography.
Iturbide studied film during the late 1960s at the Centro de Estudios Cinematograficos in Guadalajara and began mentorship under the influential photographer Manuel Alvarez Bravo. This led to her love of photography, and the artist’s visual language was shaped by metaphor, dreams, and the depictions of life cycles. The exhibition includes a display of artworks by Iturbide and Alvarez Bravo in dialogue, highlighting their collaboration, shared influences, and divergent approaches through SFMOMA’s vintage prints by the artists.
“Graciela Iturbide’s photographs describe an array of life in Mexico that is so intimate and full of wonder that the viewer feels transported into a literary realm, like that of a vivid novel.”
— Delphine Sims, SFMOMA’s assistant curator of photography
Revelation and ritual
By the late 1970s and early 1980s, Iturbide created some of her most well-known work while living with Indigenous communities, including the Seri of the Sonoran Desert and the Zapotec women of Juchitan, Oaxaca. A respect for ancestral tradition and relationship building granted Iturbide entrance into the worlds she captured. For several years, she lived among the Juchitecas, witnessing the ways in which women and muxes (those living beyond gender binaries) play central roles. The trust Iturbide earned can be witnessed in Magnolia (2), Juchitán, México (1986). Magnolia holds a mirror beside her face, glancing upward. The image shows the pleasure she takes in her own adornment, and the dramatic lighting creates the sense of a classic painting.
Though photography is often assumed to be a document of reality, Iturbide creates uncertainty about what is real in works like Ritual, fiestas de Niño Fidencio, Espinazo, Nuevo León, México (2000). A shirt floating in dark water, upon closer examination, reveals a head and hand emerging from the fabric. The image is imbued with a surreal, enigmatic sense of ritual. Throughout the long arc of her career and international travels, Iturbide was captivated by the natural world with a focus on bird life. After a visit to the Southern United States in the early 2010s, she shifted her attention away from the body toward expansive abstract landscapes. The photograph, Carretera 61, de Clarksdale, Mississippi, a Memphis, Tennessee, Estados Unidos (Highway 61, from Clarksdale, Mississippi, to Memphis, Tennessee, United States), (1997), possesses the same brooding surrealism as her portrait work. The backlit building in the center of the frame seems to be hiding behind the foliage, confronting the viewer.
Frida Kahlo
The exhibition includes a focused of selection of photographs Iturbide made of Frida Kahlo’s bathroom at the Casa Azul. She was the first to enter the room, which, at the request of Diego Rivera, had remained sealed for 50 years following Kahlo’s death in 1954. The artist was invited to view and document the room and its contents before the objects were cataloged. The photographs revealed the space in an untouched state, offering a rare, intimate view of Kahlo’s personal life through objects she lived with and left behind. El baño de Frida, Coyoacán, Ciudad de México (Frida’s Bathroom, Coyoacán, Mexico City), (2006), is a ghostly portrait of one of the corsets Kahlo wore to stabilize her torso from the spinal damage inflicted by a bus accident. The corset sits in semidarkness on a shelf, seemingly waiting for its owner’s return.
Street scenes, botanical studies, birds, and landscapes — whatever Graciela Iturbide captures in her photography is a consistent tribute to dreamlike beauty, slow observation, and the power of meditative looking.
